All about Peggy: Part 2: Dancing with Bears

Peggy’s first adventure with bears occurred while camped in the Arizona desert (the place was named the Coronado National Forest because of its ten-foot tall trees). Our camper consisted of a bear-defeating aluminum canopy mounted on the bed of a pristine white ’73 Datsun truck named Lolita. I so loved Lolita that I at least sponge-bathed her daily when we were away, including the engine compartment. Such compulsion is burdensome, but I couldn’t imagine driving down the road in a truck that wasn’t sufficiently clean for surgery. Peggy later complained that our photo album contained more pictures of Lolita than of her. This was true, but it was also true that I hadn’t followed-up on my plan to put a wedding ring on Lolita’s cute little distributor cable, and that the only presents I had given her were things like spark plugs and oil filters that Peggy didn’t care for anyway. To make a long story less long…

There we were, in the middle of the night, camped sixty miles from the Old West town of Tombstone, when my young bride suddenly and inexplicably announced that she had to “tinkle.” The park service had thoughtfully provided an outhouse for such troublemakers, but between us and it gamboled a large flock of feisty bears who were pursuing their hobby of emptying garbage cans and demolishing coolers. As Readers’ Digest regularly reminded its readers, what bears most enjoy doing is killing attractive young women—a description that still fits Peggy perfectly despite her advanced years—by hiding in outhouses and ripping-off their arms, legs, and heads before working-up to serious damage.

Aside from sunny and safe Sunday afternoon outings to the Jackson, Mississippi, zoo where the bears are tastefully locked behind stout iron bars so that courageous adolescent boys can impress wide-eyed adolescent girls by taunting them (the bears, I mean), Peggy and I had never laid eyes on an actual, in-the-flesh bear. Worse yet, these Arizona bears were nothing like the Jackson zoo bears in that these bears were looking high and low for innocent young camperettes. What’s more, they had us surrounded, and the moonless night was every bit as dark as a moonless night. 

Despite these unhappy statistics, Peggy remained grimly determined to pee. Such stubbornness represented a side to her that I hadn’t seen, and that troubled me greatly because, as I told myself, any woman who becomes this stubborn over a trivial matter like peeing would be capable of committing any manner of faux pas in the face of something important. 

Having nothing better to do at the moment, I decided to approach Peggy’s problem through the application of intelligent thought. Specifically, I thought about the following: (a) Our bed occupied the entire interior of the camper; (b) The canopy roof was too low for Peggy to squat over a jar; (c) Peggy might find it impossible to pee safely and effectively within the confines of a space that rendered safe and effective peeing impossible; (d) The solution to Peggy’s problem lay in solving for X when X=a+b÷3.14-7. Because I had no idea how to solve for X, or what solving for X would even accomplish, I regrettably concluded that intelligent thought is a waste of time except when boiling popcorn.

However (and it was BIG however), I saw in a flash that the cerebration of the stupidest man who ever lived is so superior to that of the most brilliant woman (Peggy), that I had no choice but to cancel my subscription to Ms Magazine. “What are you talking about?” you ask. I am talking about how a man, any man, could, in three easy steps, solve a problem that had short-circuited the brain of the female genius who lay squirming at my side with yellow liquid sloshing against her teeth. Here are those steps: (a) raise the camper door (this is extremely important); (b) lie on one’s side; (c) pee through the open door!

Irrefutable though my reasoning was, I knew it would be ill-advised to share it with a member of a gender that becomes overcome by feelings of feminine inferiority in the face of male rationality, so I settled for suggesting to Peggy that she tell her bladder to stop whining until the bears had gone to bed. I shed a tear when she promised to do her best because, inadequate though her best would be, not even a man could do more than that. Unfortunately…

As time passed, Peggy’s moaning and squirming achieved the desperation of a sugar cube in boiling water. Between moans, we could hear the bears snickering as they awaited her emergence, but we could tell that some of them had moved to another part of the campground. It was then that a plan presented itself. Peggy said it was time for extreme measures, so she would get out of bed and pee by the back bumper while I stood lookout. “That doesn’t sound like much of a plan to my male brain,” I said, “but if it’s what you want, I’ll lie in bed and protect you,” To my dismay, she made the power-hungry argument that I could best protect her by getting out of the camper for a less obstructed view, and to be on hand to eviscerate criminally-disposed bears. I told her that she sounded arrogant, masculine, and shrill, and it was then that the air became pregnant with tension. 

Peggy finally said that I could do as I pleased, but that if I stayed in bed, she too would stay in bed, and her side of the bed would most assuredly remain dry. Dry from what, I didn’t know, but her tone sounded ominous, so I offered to accompany her. We knew there were no bears behind the truck because there was no noise behind the truck, so I exited first—Peggy was insistent on this point—and chivalrously helped her to exit. Once on the ground, it was my job to stand beside her as I leaned from one side of the back of the truck to the other so that no bears could sneak-up on us.

As I was heroically occupied in doing my job, Peggy busied  herself by keeping a bone-crushing grip on my calf while tinkling as fast as she could go. Simple though these tasks were, she performed them admirably, although I later found it necessary to chide her for bruising my shin and calf. I also took issue with the fact that she had peed on my foot. “How could this have happened?” you ask. It happened because I had been so dedicated to doing my job properly that I took no notice of Peggy’s failure to do the same, the result being that when warm liquid ran across my foot and made mud pies inside my dusty flip-flop, I didn’t immediately divine its source. The situation could have been worse, of course, had the bears found the odor so maddening that they charged us like Crazy Horse charged Custer. 

What I learned about peeing that night was that, on the one hand, abject terror can make peeing impossibly unavoidable; on the other hand, it can make it unavoidably impossible. Such considerations notwithstanding, Peggy stuck to the task at hand. When she emerged victorious, I said that, in the interest of companionability, I too would pee, and that, in the interest of chivalry, she would guard me as I had guarded her. When she didn’t respond, I looked toward where she had been and found myself alone in a moonless wilderness.

I naturally concluded that bears had martyred my beloved, so imagine my dismay when I happened to glance into the camper and found that she was cleaning her facial pores with witch hazel. When I, too, had returned to our snug fortress, I respectfully inquired, “Had I been massacred, Dear, would you have pulled my corpse to safety or left it for the rangers to stumble upon while you toured the Grand Canyon?” Snores prevented her from answering, so I broached the subject again over breakfast, adding that she should have informed me of her proclivity for snoring before we were married, so I could have decided upon the advisability of a shared future. I also asked if she had withheld other fatal flaws, but I regretted my cruel words a moment later when her pretty face reflected the anguish of a sensitive soul who was too remorseful to speak. I have no idea why, but everyone else on earth mistakes the expression for boredom.

Part Two

After moving to Oregon, Peggy and I camped every other week in pretty weather, staying out for 2-3 nights at a time in areas so remote that we seldom saw anyone (in Oregon, such places are easy to find). When sleeping in Lolita became uncomfortable for my beloved’s constantly aging joints, I magnanimously surprised her with a vintage 3/4 ton van with almost no dents and a high ground clearance for traversing rutted logging roads. On this occasion—as on many others—she was so overwhelmed by gratitude that she went through four stages of self-expression. 

Stage 1: Peggy is unable to make a sound. 

Stage 2: Peggy makes sounds resembling speech, but no one knows what they mean.

Stage 3: Peggy jokingly asks if I can get our money back.

Stage 4: Peggy jumps up and down in her characteristic happy dance; smiles her grimace-like smile; and pours out her gratitude with such playful teases as, “I hope you bought me a parachute so I won’t break a leg getting out of the _____ thing.” Many people claim that Peggy’s childlike humor is her most endearing quality, and that they hope to experience it someday. 

By happy coincidence, Oregon’s black bear population abounds alongside salal, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, salmonberries, huckleberries, and hazelnuts. On the joyful day in question, we were biking down an abandoned coastal logging road when I spotted three bear cubs not twenty feet away. I threw on brakes and exclaimed, “Sweetheart, bride of my youth, look, oh look, at the darling little bears!” I naturally interpreted her silence as the product of unspeakable delight, so imagine my dismay when I turned toward where she had been, and found that I had been speaking to a tree. I naturally assumed that a bear had eaten her and was busy accustoming myself to widowerhood when I chanced to see a woman who resembled my late wife receding into the distance as fast as her pretty legs could pedal her sexy red bike. Because I knew that Peggy would want me to love again, I set out after the mysterious “woman on red,” but a race horse couldn’t have caught her.

Some might say that Peggy, unlike her husband, behaved rationally given that mother bears tend to annihilate anything that comes near their cubs, trees included. I would respond that there is not a single record of a single black bear killing or injuring a single person to protect a single cub (although their predilection for human flesh often inspires them to peel people like bananas). What black bears are on record for doing is running rapidly away from their little ones at the merest hint of danger. Therefore, if you should someday sneeze while walking through the woods, you should immediately recite whatever prayer you remember (“God is great; God is good; let us thank God for our food” became favored by many after a news report claimed that no one who used it reported being killed by a bear) because you are in grave danger of being flattened by one or more fleeing bears...The image of a female abandoning her loved ones brings my thoughts back to Peggy.

“Why,” I demanded, when I finally found her cowering in her bedroom closet two days later, “did you abandon me to certain death?” “I didn’t abandon you,” she mumbled while staring at the floor. “Like you, I wanted to get all drippy while schmoozing with Pattington Bear’s mother, but because I love you, I gave up what I wanted in order to get help for you in case she turned out to be half grizzly.”

The realization that my wife held my physical prowess in such low esteem that she didn’t trust me to protect her from a buttress of brutal bruins hurt my feelings twenty times worse than had she proclaimed me a bear-destroyer par eccellenza, but I was too scared to tell her that, so I rhetorically asked, “My gentlest darling, was that really why you rode away as fast as your wrinkled legs could pedal your sexy red bike?” “How could you have doubted it?” she cooed. “After all, Snowie darling, you know what grizzlies are like because we almost saw a whole gaggle of them on that trail in Canada. If those hikers we met hadn’t told us that there were bears ahead, and if we hadn’t run to the car and stampeded back to Montana without even stopping at the border station, you would have shown those Canucks what you were made of, and it wouldn’t have been pretty.” “You’re right, my brown-eyed nymphet. If I hadn’t gotten homesick for the Home of the Brave, I might have pixillated every bear in Canada because I’m so intimidating that there are days when I don’t dare look at myself in the mirror.” It was here that she kissed my cheek. Most people mistake Peggy for a total hard-ass, but she can be half nice when she puts her whole heart into it.

Next time All About Peggy: Part 3: Peggy Abandons Me to a Flurry of Hawaiian Wolverines

All about Peggy: Part 1: The Tumor

 
By September, 1971, Peggy and I were engaged. On the memorable day in question, we were in my parents’ backyard petting my little dog, Wolf (I grew-up naming all of my dogs Wolf, Sassy, or Tippy). I had just stepped inside for a glass of water when I heard Peggy emit an anguished cry that erased all thought of thirst. I ran to her side where, with trembling fingers, she pointed to a large, gray, marble-sized sphere on Wolf’s neck and, with the solemn reserve of one who has tragic news to convey, said softly, “Wolf has a tumor.”

I then did the last thing she expected a sane person to do upon learning that his dog has a tumor so aggressive that it wasn’t there the previous day. I laughed. I think I might have laughed until I cried, but 51-years is a long time to remember such details. When my laughter subsided, I grasped the hideous gray orb between thumb and forefinger, “unscrewed” it from Wolf’s neck, and crushed the blood-gorged monster between two bricks that I carried for the purpose. Peggy was beside herself with admiration. In fact, she was floored, flummoxed, and no less addled than a goose with a skull fracture. Her face paled; her eyes bugged; and she looked at me as if afraid to look away. Then, almost imperceptibly, she started sliding her pretty bottom in the other direction. Perceptive young man that I was, I knew that she did these things because she was humbled by the knowledge that, only in America, could a woman with beauty, brains, but no money, marry such a man.

I was entertaining similar thoughts myself, but instead of rejoicing, I was wondering if I shouldn’t find myself a bride with beauty, brains and money. Regrettably, my innocence and naiveté enabled the 20-year-old San Antonio rose to lure me into the grim matrimonial pit from which I continue to gaze helplessly at a tiny wedge of distant sky. When I tell her of my bitterness each morning over yet another bowl of cold, unsalted gruel, she cruelly retorts that while a gigolo looks to his woman to make him rich, a real man looks to himself to make his woman rich. So much for feminism! So much for a bride taking responsibility for ruining her husband’s life! So much for women’s cruel indifference to non-pecuniary genius! But let us return to that long ago day in Mississippi, a day so long ago that the world was still in black and white…

As Peggy continued to scoot her pretty bottom away from me, I shouted: “Peggy, my love, Wolf’s ‘tumor’ was a blood-bloated tick that would have latched onto your eyeballs had I not killed him when I did. I only laughed because it had never occurred to me that you didn’t know what a tick looked like.” She couldn’t have been more impressed had I rescued her from a ‘possum. I knew this because she persisted in silently opening her mouth in sexy resemblance to a freshly-caught catfish. Although the heavenly vision she conveyed was impaired by her lack of a catfish’s gray skin and whiskers, I tried to put aside her failure in that department just as I tried to put aside her failure in the money department. Unfortunately, fifty-years of looking up at a tiny wedge of sky has made my neck hurt and left me depressed, especially when the sky is clear but also when it is cloudy. When I consider the joy that might have been mine had I been born a gay Icelandic ailurophile, I just want to retch. In fact, I think I will.

Next time: “All about Peggy: Part 2: Why a Woman Who Hates Cats has Five Cats”

Of What Good is a Cat?

Peggy and I were married in late ’71; our friends, Lynn and Christy, in early ’72. Soon afterward, Christy got a kitten that she adored. After giving birth, she said that her eyes had opened, and she realized that her beloved pet was, after all, “only a cat.” Maybe the same fate will befall the woman who insisted that her cat understood every word she said and loved her completely. This hints at the power imbalance between humans and creatures whose existence requires our love and loyalty. Cats, being solitary animals, might not understand that their lives are in the hands of an unstable species, but perhaps dogs do, and that’s why they’re desperate to please us.

I think most people marry a delusion, but time reveals the reality, and perhaps the same is true of my love for my cats. But again, how would I know when it comes to a creature so otherly? Dogs are easier to understand because, like us, they are a social species. Call a dog, and she comes running; call a cat, and the cat might or might not amble in, that is unless I have food in which case all five cats appear without being called. Count on it, when the cheese is unwrapped or the butter dish unscrewed, there they are.

I remember a day when our fifteen-pounder, Brewsky, was relaxing on the floor one moment and inside an open cabinet six feet off the floor the next. Such things must be seen to be believed, and even then it’s hard, but that’s the magic of cats. They’re little thin-boned predators that are easily injured, have no aerobic stamina, are impossible to know, and force me to accommodate them because they sure as hell won’t accommodate me, but they’re also loving, mysterious, have keen senses, and make Olympic athletes look like couch-potatoes.

Every night at 10:00, the cats and I pile into my twin bed where I spend the next two hours reading. While I read, they sleep; bathe; roughhouse; crawl under the covers; crawl out from under the covers; leave the room; return to the room; go crazy when a fly passes overhead; and sip water from the bowl I keep amidst my many potted plants. I sing to them, praise them lavishly, insult them cruelly, and tell them about my reading. I also introduce sundry conversational topics concerning the meaning and nature of Felis catus. Last night, I asked how they can stay so damn beautiful on a diet of corpses. The cats who happened to be looking in my direction continued to look in my direction; the cats who were looking in another direction continued to look in another direction. When I saw that my question was going nowhere, I asked how they are able to instantaneously go from deep relaxation, to leaping two feet in the air to kill a fly, to deep relaxation. There followed another awkward silence during which I became embittered by the suspicion that they were simply reviewing my words in the hope of finding a reference to butter.

So, you wonder, why do Peggy and I keep our butter in a stout container with a screwable lid? It is well you should ask. The reason is that our first-born, Brewsky, discovered that he could get all the butter he wanted by shoving the glass butter dish off the counter and breaking it. We objected for various reasons, among them the possibility of vomit everywhere and a 3:00 a.m. emergency surgery. He hotly insisted that our concerns were asinine, but when he broke another butter dish, we got a cat-proof container. He was livid but powerless.

If my cats weighed fifty pounds, they would eat all the butter they pleased, and if a mad scientist exploded them to 200-pounds, I’m not sure but what they would eat me too. But doesn’t this contradict my belief that they love me? It’s not their love I question; it’s their inherent wildness. In the mad scientist scenario, I can imagine the following sequence of events: cats tentatively toy with frail humanoid who once towered over them; cats’ paw-swipes knock humanoid to floor; humanoid bleeds; cats become excited by the combined odor of blood and hysteria; cats’ pupils become black saucers; cats flatten their pointy ears and lay back their long whiskers; humanoid tries to dial 911; cats knock phone from humanoid’s hand; humanoid’s broken bones impede his desperate attempt to crawl to safety; cats take turns swatting humanoid; humanoid lies still; cats dismember humanoid; cats agree that humanoid tastes terrible; cats bathe themselves and one another; cats sleep in a kitty-pile; cats have happy dreams; cats sup on cheese and butter. That’s one possibility. Another possibility is that they would show humanoid the same gentle affection that cats have lavished on chickens, rabbits, and other prey animals with which they were raised.

But doesn’t the fact that large dogs treat their humans gently suggest that large cats would too? I think not. Dogs are a social species that have lain beside our fires for 23,000 years, during which time we’ve genetically transformed them from dignified hunters into groveling slaves who would starve on their own. Cats are a solitary species that entered our lives a mere ten millennia ago, and have largely resisted our attempts to make them into freaks. Dogs love us because we’ve molded them that way. Cats love us because we mold ourselves.

How can we mold ourselves so cats will love us? First, we must provide food, shelter, toys, and treats, although these things alone can no more buy the love of a cat than they can buy the love of a child. It is therefore necessary to: move slowly, speak softly, touch gently, behave predictably, and be quietly affectionate. But how do we know that cats are even capable of loving humans? We know it because they offer us affection; seek our support; warn us of danger; grieve when we die; and sometimes risk their lives to save ours.

Dog lovers have allowed dogs to set the standard for what an animal’s love is supposed to look like. Dogs say, “What you love, I love. What you hate, I hate. Even if you abuse me, I will steal for you, kill for you, and, if I could, I would write bad checks for you.” Cats say, “I love you, but I have my own life to lead, and if you force me to choose between death and slavery, I will choose death.” 

I feel a commonality with cats. To illustrate. If I’m reading in bed and no cats join me, I’ll call them. If they don’t come, I’ll go looking for them. Like as not, I’ll find them sitting about the house, in the dark, staring at walls. I am hurt by the thought that they prefer doing nothing to spending time with me. Yet, there have been hundreds of times when I was staring at the computer, and it suddenly dawned on me that a meowing cat had left the room because I hadn’t heeded his repeated requests for attention. Might not such a cat be as hurt by my inattention as I am by his?

Ailurophiles praise cats for being clean, beautiful, polite, funny, honest, independent, honorable, and affectionate. Ailurophobes insist that cats are vain, stupid, cowardly, selfish, tyrannical, sadistic, and altogether disgusting. They argue that while dogs are out guarding children, guiding the blind, herding cattle, warning of intruders, sniffing out bombs, digging for avalanche victims, finding lost hikers, subduing criminals, alerting people to cancers, and making themselves indispensable in a thousand other ways, cats are home licking their asses and hoping for something to murder. While it is true that few cats serve a practical function, few dogs do either, yet we love them and other “useless” things (sports, TV, and babies, for instance), so why not love cats? Then too, how well does our species measure up to the unselfish standard by which we praise dogs? Given the number of unloved dogs that live miserably, die horribly, and are killed in shelters, not terribly well. I would even say that dogs and cats are better people than we are, but then that’s not saying much.

Chevrolet is doing a series of highly realistic television commercials that feature a cat named Walter whose strength, courage, leadership, energy, fortitude, alertness, intelligence, and loyalty are, like those of most cats, ignored by his oblivious human. In closing, I will offer the most recent Walter ad for your elucidation, and perhaps, your edification:

We Form a Group Marriage

 

In 1987, I took a job at the University of Oregon where I was instantly attracted to a woman named Ellen who conducted the group orientation for new employees. A former alcoholic, Ellen was also a movie buff who decorated her apartment with black and white glossies of yesteryear’s stars. She had grown up in a small Willamette Valley town and, after marriage, had moved to an even smaller town in Oregon’s Great Basin Desert. Her marital unhappiness and her hatred of the area’s provincialism led her to leave her husband and move to liberal Eugene. It was here that she embraced feminism, and it was here that she found inspiration in a 19th century Swedish ancestor whose rejection of women’s assigned roles in society caused her family to disown her (she then made her home under an overhanging boulder, enabling Ellen to claim that she descended from a woman who crawled out from under a rock). When we met, Ellen had won acceptance into doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota, and was cashing in her retirement savings to fiance her education. She would be leaving Eugene in three months, and so it was that—with Peggy’s knowledge and consent—she and I spent as much time together as possible.

That fall (1987), I flew to Minneapolis. Ellen having no car, and the weather being bitching cold by Eugene standards, she laughed merrily as we walked about the downtown area, and locals stared from restaurant windows because I was wearing every piece of clothing I had. When it came time to discuss the future of our relationship, I brought up the possibility of group marriage. She reacted angrily until I assured her that modern polyfidelity was egalitarian. I then described my relationship with Peggy in order to convince Ellen that gender oppression was the furtherest thing from my mind. The following two paragraphs summarize what I said:

“Although I work as hard as Peggy, what money I earn comes from jobs that are temporary and/or part-time, my ‘real work’ consisting of housework, yard work, and home improvement projects. Just as Peggy is bored by working at home and finds fulfillment in her nursing career, I prefer the independence that comes with working at home. The gender roles that society demands of us don’t fit, but going our own way is also hard, especially for me because while the public envisions a housewife as being deficient in skills, intelligence, and ambition, it regards a househusband as a despicable sponge who is a man in name only. My own mother called me a loser, a failure, a kept man, a disappointment, and a good for nothing who will never amount to anything. She calls Peggy my better half (and means it), and says that Peggy is a good woman who married beneath herself. Yet, I thrive on hard physical labor, and I’m so driven to get things done that I stay busy every waking moment. I even limit my reading to practical nonfiction. What’s more, when Peggy’s 36-hour work week ends, her time is her own, but because I live on my job site, I’m driven to keep working. At the same time, I’m in charge of my life in ways that are impossible for those who work for someone else.

“At the other end of the spectrum from my mother, Peggy’s career-oriented women friends complain that their husbands dump all the housework and childcare on them. They tell Peggy that she’s lucky to have a husband who mows, cooks, bakes, launders, shops, pays bills, mops floors, raises a garden, cans food, makes beds, services cars, irons her nursing uniforms, takes on home improvement projects, and makes money on the side. They ask to borrow me, and laughingly warn her that some woman will try to steal me.”

Because Ellen scorned conventional lifestyles, she was intrigued, her greatest concern being that Peggy and I agree to the eventual addition of another man. She spent the following summer back in Oregon with Peggy and me, and the two of them got along famously. By then, Peggy also had a reason for wanting to live in Minneapolis. Specifically, she wished to trade ICU nursing for L&D, but Eugene was experiencing such a nursing glut that Sacred Heart required previous L&D experience. Minneapolis’ Abbott Northwestern had no such requirement, but their only opening was in antepartum. That was close enough to satisfy Sacred Heart’s requirement of prior experience.

For my part, I had no desire to move to Minnesota after less than two years in a place I loved, and I was further discouraged by Minnesota’s harsh winters. I shared my feelings with Ellen and Peggy, but they were both so excited about the move, and they both so needed to move for career reasons that I felt I had to go. They suggested that I think of living in Minnesota as an adventure and promised we could return to Oregon when Vicki graduated.

So it was that in August, 1988, we made our marriage vows—and ate our wedding cake—in the company of Eugene’s polyfidelity community. On the legal front, Peggy went back to using her maiden name. On the nonlegal front, we declared ourselves the Speedwell Family, a name which was inspired by the flower. More aptly in our case, it was also the name of a leaky ship that the pilgrims of 1620 were forced to abandon on their voyage to America.

The closer we came to moving, the more hesitant I became. On October 2, I got word that my mother was dying, and I arrived in Mississippi just in time to hold her hand as she breathed her last. Two days later, I was back in Oregon renting a Ryder Truck and a car carrier for Peggy’s Ford (my Datsun truck was already in Minnesota, and we took turns driving a third car). Prior to the move, Peggy and I sold our house in Oregon, and the three of us bought a house in Minneapolis, yet everything within me screamed, “Don’t go!”

Yellowstone National Park—which is larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined—burned that summer—and we narrowly avoided a very long detour by exiting the east gate just before it closed. Peggy and Ellen got along famously and enjoyed themselves immensely, but the best light that I could put on the situation was the hope that things might not go as bad as I feared.

Snow fell on Minneapolis the day after our October arrival, and by Christmas, night-time lows were in the -20s F. No matter how cold the weather, I felt duty-bound to take our sweatered schnauzer on her daily walks, but I shortened the walks when she tried to enter every house we passed. Yet, I found that windless, sunny days were actually pleasant if the temperature stayed above zero. The worst part of Minnesota winters wasn’t the snow and cold per se, but the slippery roads, the city filth that settled on the snow, and the grimy, salt-encrusted cars. I had always prided myself on how well I cared for cars, and every rust-bucket I passed was a reminder that my cars would soon look like that. Like many people, I tried to minimize the damage with frequent washes, but was discouraged by the fact that cars looked as bad six blocks after being washed as they looked before being washed. So it was that car care—like the rest of my life—seemed like a lost battle, and by now, Ellen and I did little but battle.

Yet, I found a lot to like about Minneapolis. We started a support group at our house; made friends at the atheistic First Unitarian Society; found respite from winter at St. Paul Conservatory; fell in love with old Fort Snelling and the Minneapolis Institute of Art; enjoyed the trails at nearby Wood Lake Park; and found pleasure in estate sales. Despite all this, my mental state had so deteriorated by our second winter in Minnesota that I started seeing a psychoanalyst who put me on an antidepressant called Norpramin.

Peggy and Ellen decided that a winter trip to Arizona would do me good, and I needed no persuasion. Peggy and I flew down in January, 1990. The weather, the scenery, and our time together were heavenly, but Ellen and I continued our fights over the telephone. Once back in Minnesota, our relationship so deteriorated that Peggy never left for work but what she feared that we would become violent in her absence, though we never did. When she switched from staying out of our battles to taking my side, our homelife deteriorated even further. On one occasion, she shook her fist in Vicki’s face. Soon afterward, she came home from work and found Ellen naked and screaming while I held her from behind for fear she would wreck the house. That was it for Peggy, so she arranged for a job interview back in Oregon. Because I had felt trapped in the marriage from the outset and never wanted to be in Minnesota in the first place, I prepared to follow. Ellen also wanted to call it quits.

By the time Peggy returned to Oregon in March 1990, the nursing glut was over, and so the hospital would have hired her to work in L&D even without her antepartum experience in Minnesota. This meant that her work in Minneapolis had not furthered her career and that, as she saw it, she had given up her seniority for nothing. We were also shocked to discover that housing prices had risen by over a third, the market being so hot that we had to compete in a three-way bidding war for the house that we have occupied for the past 32-years. As for her living arrangements in Oregon—prior to my return in May—she and a friend named Elaine, who was also leaving a failed marriage, moved into the Lincoln Street home of a mutual friend named Shirley, laughingly calling it “Shirley’s Home for Wayward Women.” Both women had attended our marriage to Ellen.

In closing, I will anticipate a few questions… 

 

Are participants in a mixed gender marriage necessarily bisexual?

This is up to the people who form the marriage although everyone in a group marriage considers themselves married to everyone else.

What did you tell your families about your relationship?

Ellen had scant contact with her father and none with her mother, so telling them was a non-issue, but my father and Peggy’s parents visited us in Minneapolis. Peggy knew her parents would be horrified, so we allowed them to assume that Ellen was our housemate. I had always been open with my parents, so I told my father, although he persisted in thinking of Ellen as a live-in lover.

What was the hardest part of your marriage to Ellen?

Because I don’t feel comfortable detailing the reasons Ellen and I argued so much, I’ll just say that the second hardest part was having to defend our marriage’s validity. Some examples: It rankled me that we couldn’t legally share a last name… I went to war with the Minnesota Zoo because they refused to issue us a “family membership…” I complained to the minister at First Unitarian about a sermon in which he described marriage in traditional terms… I felt called upon to explain that, no, we weren’t old style Mormons, and, no, I wasn’t putting together a harem. Living on the defensive wore me down, but because I was unwilling to hide the nature of our relationship, I didn’t know what else to do.

Are you in contact with Ellen?

Peggy and I haven’t been in contact with her since 1990. When I googled her today, I was pleased to learn that she is still working and is prominent in her field. 

Was this your only group marriage experience?

Two years after our return to Oregon, Peggy’s lover—who was also my best friend—proposed that we start a group marriage with him. On the upside, Walt was generous, playful, humorous, spontaneous, versatile, intelligent, optimistic, energetic, and possessed of unlimited self-confidence. On the downside, he never mowed his lawn; his house was dirty and unorganized; and he spent money as fast as he made it. He said he would change, but we doubted he could, and it was obvious that he didn’t realize how profound our differences were. For example, after he brought his wok over and cooked for us, I spent the next day cleaning grease off the floor, the cabinets, and the ceiling; and whenever he showered at our house, he made such a mess that I cleaned the bathroom when he was gone. When I surprised him by cleaning his Land Rover, he complained that he had liked the moss that grew in the window tracks, and he became equally upset when I mowed his yard.

How do you now feel about group marriage? 

Traditional marriage being so difficult despite public acceptance, I have come to have serious doubts about the feasibility of group marriage. Personal limitations have also led me to lose interest. Specifically, age and chronic pain have left me fragile and robbed me of strength, energy, boldness, and optimism. My basic belief in the core abilities of myself and others has also plummeted. In closing, I can but say that I respect what Peggy, Ellen, and I tried to accomplish all those years ago, and I also respect the courage and boldness we showed in making the effort.

We Arrive in Eugene

 

We would have moved to Eugene a year earlier had Peggy been able to find work at Sacred Heart Medical Center (I did property maintenance and assumed I could find a job anywhere). As we sat in Fresno (see two posts back) with Peggy’s job running out, she called Sacred Heart to ask about job openings. The news was encouraging, so we drove up for an interview, and she was hired as an ICU nurse. Within weeks, we rented an apartment; flew to Mississippi to sell our house; loaded our possessions into a U-Haul; and moved to Oregon at the hospital’s expense.

When we arrived in ‘86, Eugene had a large hippie population and called itself the “Berkeley of the North” and the “Tie-Dye Capital of the World.” Near where we now live is the site on which Eugene’s founder, Eugene Skinner, built a cabin when he arrived in 1846 with 1,200 other settlers. During the next decade, 20,000 people came to the Willamette Valley, most of them over the famed Oregon Trial. By then, 92% of the indigenous Kalapuya had died of settler-borne diseases and their survivors imprisoned on distant reservations where their tribal identity was lost through intermarriage with other tribes. I joined two lodges that Skinner had belonged to (the Freemasons and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows—IOOF)—and searched the minutes without finding a single mention of the plight of the Kalapuyas.

Upon our arrival, Eugene was home to communes, the Hemlock Society, the University of Oregon, and a national polyfidelity group. City buses were new to me, and I got a kick out of bussing to whatever classes interested me at Lane Community College, and I worked at the University of Oregon as liaison between the university and a building contractor. During our first year in Eugene, we lived in two apartments and bought a house.  I had only known two foreigners in Mississippi, but, because of the University of Oregon, they were common here, and so it was that Peggy and I had a delightful Saudi roommate followed by a disagreeable Bosnian roommate.

Most of the Eugenians I met weren’t born here, and I found that they discussed their shrinks and support groups as casually as Mississippians did their preachers. In another reversal, I met people who embraced atheism, Bahai, Buddhism, Sikhism, New Thought, nature worship, and Wicca. An avid baker, I discovered flours that were new to me (spelt, kamut, quinoa, barley, buckwheat, and amaranth), and I even found grits (a Southern staple) in a heartier form called polenta.

Most cars had bumper stickers promoting liberal, anarchistic, vegetarian, and/or environmentalist values, although I would occasionally see “Loggers Are An Endangered Species Too,” or “Ted Kennedy’s Car Has Killed More People than My Gun.” Street demonstrations abounded, as did Volkswagen vans painted with trees, rainbows, unicorns, and peace symbols. The Grateful Dead performed yearly, and with them came the Deadhead Invasion consisting of thousands of blissed-out freaks who promptly emptied local food banks.

The annual Oregon Country Fair with its drugs, nudity, wild costumes, and painted bodies, epitomized Eugene’s anything goes mentality, and Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, made the news with asinine speeches, including one in which he encouraged a high school audience to smoke pot. The Saturday Market featured local artists and craftspeople, but the California Invasion—aka the Californicators—had yet to run up home prices and imbue Eugene with a Middle America mentality that their predecessors came here to escape. Olympic track and field trials were—and are—often held in Eugene (aka TrackTown USA), and it was here that Bill Bowerman used a waffle iron to create the sole of the world’s first Nike.

Memories of protests against the War in Vietnam—including burning the records at a local draft board—were still fresh, as was the Weather Underground, two members of which were arrested separately after my arrival. One of the two, Silas Bissell, was convicted of firebombing an ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) center and the other, Katherine Power, of participating in a bank robbery in which a guard was machine-gunned. Both had lived respectable lives in Eugene, Bissell as a physical therapist, and Power as co-owner of the popular Napoli Restaurant.

In the ‘90s, many of Eugene’s anarchists and environmentalists endorsed violence to combat capitalistic exploitation, and so it was that they vandalized vehicles, smashed store windows, attacked the police, burned a ski lodge, twice firebombed SUVs at Romania Chevrolet, toppled a fire tower, freed animals at a fur farm, vandalized a furniture store during its yearly “leather sale,” burned a lumber company, disabled high-transmission lines, sabotaged logging equipment, vomited on Eugene’s mayor at a city council meeting, fire-bombed the Oakridge Ranger Station, placed bombs inside a tanker truck at Tyee Oil, and vandalized a modest home in a rundown neighborhood because its owner had committed the crime of gentrification by repainting.

Although some of these crimes were committed elsewhere, Eugene was nonetheless the hub from which many militants operated. Mayor Jim Torrey called his city “The Anarchist Capital of the United States,” and invited their representatives to meet with him for an hour (they spent the hour silently glaring). Eugene’s reign of terror only ended when an FBI investigation resulted in prison sentences for ten men and nine women.* Here’s the Register-Guard bio of Jeff Luers, Eugene’s best known anarchist, who, at age 21, received a 23-year sentence for burning vehicles and planting bombs. https://www.registerguard.com/article/20140406/news/304069982.

Since my arrival, Eugene has come to suffer from the problems that characterize many American cities. When I arrived in 1986, cars were excluded from several downtown blocks, which was a charming area with playful statuary, quaint shops, open-air restaurants, galleries featuring local artists, and hanging baskets with cascading petunias. Then, activist bureaucrats sent in the bulldozers, and when the dust cleared, the pedestrian mall had been reopened to cars, and the small shops and restaurants replaced by multi-story apartment buildings reminiscent of Communist Romania. The shoppers, strollers, and diners took their business to the suburbs, and in their place were muggers, vandals, addicts, belligerent drunks, aggressive panhandlers, paranoid schizophrenics, gangs of shoplifters, and lowlifes that congregate in front of businesses and harass customers.

Thanks to activist bureaucrats, Eugene now has the highest per capita homeless population in the country.* Large city parks house hundreds of campers, making them off-limits to those whose taxes paid for their creation and continue to pay for their maintenance. Camping on sidewalks and in vehicles is still a crime, but the police forward complaints to a Catholic charity that has no enforcement power and is only interested in helping the campers. My neighbors and I clear our neighborhood of needles, liquor bottles, and fast-food wrappers. More puzzling is the amount of usable food, clothes, blankets, and foam mattresses, that the homeless throwaway. The news media claims that one in five Eugenians go to bed hungry, yet Oregon’s poor tend toward obesity, and the state announced last week that the impoverished can now use the “Oregon Trail Card” (a government-funded debit card) to shop at yuppie markets which are unaffordable to many people.

I’ll end on an up-note by mentioning that lawyers for twenty-one high school students entered Eugene’s Federal District Courthouse this month to ask judge Ann Aiken to allow a suit that was instituted six years ago to finally go to trial. If that suit prevails, the federal government’s support of the fossil fuel industry will be declared un-Constitutional in that it conflicts with the right to a life-sustaining environment.***

* http://www.citymayors.com/society/usa-cities-homelessness.html

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganashttps://newtalavana.org/https://www.eugeneweekly.com/2006/12/07/flames-of-dissent-2/
 

*** https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2021-11-02/settlement-talks-fail-in-oregon-youths-anti-us-climate-suit

A final interesting link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_activism_in_Eugene,_Oregon.

More of My Lurid Past and Other Sordid Tales

 

When I left—I never graduated—Brookhaven, Mississippi’s high school in 1967, I had to choose between college and Vietnam. Happily, a tiny, local Methodist college called Whitworth offered me a scholarship. To say the least, I was surprised because in high school I had been… a disciplinary problem… skipped school regularly… failed to complete assignments… spent four summers in summer school in order to pass the classes I flunked in regular school… wasted two years in the tenth grade … believed my parents and teachers regarded me as mildly retarded… and got so drunk on weekends that I didn’t know where I had been or what I had done, although I was usually the one who drove.

Despite my failure to graduate from high school, my years in summer school enabled me to accumulate enough credits for college. But why would any college—even a tiny college like Whitworth—offer me a scholarship? Given that Whitworth was regarded as an academic joke, I might have been the only one to apply, but it’s also possible that Whitworth was impressed by the fact that I had aced their introductory psychology course while still in high school (I took the course in the hope of getting my head together). In any event, Whitworth had promised to give one scholarship to a country school kid and one to a “city” school kid, so they had to choose someone from Brookhaven (population 11,500), and that someone was me. Their country recipient was a valedictorian named Beau, and after devoting a long paragraph to his illustrious school career, the newspaper ended with a single sentence stating that I showed “promise.”

I loved Whitworth because it had many times the number of course options that BHS offered; because I was able to make a new start among people I hadn’t known for twelve years; and because I had teachers who encouraged me. One such teacher administered an IQ test on which I scored 160, and so it was that I immediately went to thinking I was mildly retarded to regarding myself as fucking brilliant. During my time at Whitworth, I held various jobs: stock clerk at Woolworth’s; mortician’s assistant at a local funeral home; ambulance driver; plus my father and I ran a daily 115-mile paper route.

The only big cloud on the horizon was that I had to keep changing my major in order to maintain my draft deferment, so I knew the day might come when no major would save me. A lesser problem was that Whitworth lacked regional accreditation. 

Meanwhile…

Peggy was an Air Force brat with Mississippi roots and a Mississippi birth certificate, but who vowed she would never live in Mississippi. Unfortunately, her very religious parents shipped her off to Mississippi College, a female-virginity-obsessed Southern Baptist institution near Jackson where she studied education, math, and science. She had been there three years when I transferred up from Whitworth and my roommate, Lynn Taylor introduced me to her as his date. By then, I had been ogling her from across the cafeteria for months, so I asked Lynn if he minded me asking her out. He said no, but he later told her to turn me down, thereby giving her added incentive to go out with me. 

When school ended three dates later, Peggy took a Greyhound to her parents’ home in San Antonio, and I left with an acquaintance for his home in Alberta, Canada. I couldn’t get Peggy out of my mind, so I got out of the car in Colorado and hitchhiked down to San Antonio to ask her to marry me. She and her family were greatly surprised by my midnight call from a nearby truckstop, but by the time I left San Antonio three days later, we were engaged. I felt duty-bound to formally ask her Lieutenant Colonel father for her hand, but she said she would break the news after I left. We married five months later. December 19th will mark our 50th anniversary.

After four years in college, I graduated in 1971 with five year’s worth of credits and a degree in elementary education (Peggy’s degree was in biology with minors in chemistry and secondary education). I had named that as my major in order to avoid the draft, not because I had the least interest in teaching. And so it was that I, in turn, drove an ambulance, worked as an inhalation therapy technician at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and then as a funeral director at Mississippi’s largest funeral home. 

By this time, a draft lottery had been instituted, and my number was low enough that I would have been taken had my doctor not written the Army a letter stating that I had recently passed six kidney stones. This was news to me, but I happily accepted the yearlong deferment. By the time the year was up, the war was winding down, and my number was just high enough to keep me from being drafted. Because I still had no career goal, I joined the Air Force for the simple reason that Peggy’s father, Earl, liked it. He even pulled strings so the Air Force would send me back to college to study meteorology. Sadly, three weeks into boot camp, I was discharged from the Air Force for smoking pot. Earl never showed his disappointment.

It was now 1973, and having nothing better to do, I returned to Brookhaven and got a teaching job. Four years later, I quit teaching when the administration objected to a beard I grew during summer vacation. My black principal said I looked like a militant, while his two white bosses (both of whom had spanked me when I was a student) thought I looked like a hippie. They said I would be promoted to administration if I shaved, but could be fired if I refused. I confided in my ACLU-affiliated doctor who promised me the group’s support, but I would have kept my beard regardless. As things turned out, I wasn’t fired, but I clearly wasn’t wanted, so I quit at the end of the school year. And so it was that my carpenter father gave me seven acres of Mississippi woodland, and helped me build a house that had been designed as a ski lodge. When it was completed, he and I went to work in residential and commercial property maintenance.

Peggy had never lived anywhere that wasn’t temporary, and the house that my father and I built for her—with such help as she could offer on weekends—was her dream home. Almost from day one, I felt trapped, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her, so I instead tried to make things work by turning our land into a second Eden. I also looked for escape in whatever drugs I could find and in sex with other women. Older married men had told me that finding women—married or single—was easy, and they were right. Few such women were looking for a committed relationship—although some tried to lure me away from Peggy—so as near as I could tell they had sex with me because they were bored, enjoyed the risk, needed to be told they were beautiful, wanted secret vengeance against controlling husbands, or liked the excitement of new partners. One night, Peggy dreamed that I kept calling her by the names of other women, yet I had been having sex with many more women than she knew about. (We had an open marriage by then, but as often happens with such arrangements, it was my idea, and I had sex with a lot more people than she did.)

Then came the day that I knew sex, drugs, and the creation of a second Eden would never be enough, and with this thought came the realization that I had rather be dead than spend the rest of my life in Mississippi. Various things precipitated this. (1) The older I got, the more I regarded myself as smarter and more interesting than my friends, and I wrongly imagined that I would find superior people elsewhere. (2) As I became more liberal and less religious, I increasingly felt that I didn’t belong among people who held opposing values. (3) The incident that occurred during jury duty when I was struck on the head for not standing for prayer (see last post). (4) The restaurant scene in the movie Easy Rider, a scene that was shot just across the Mississippi River in Louisiana. The malevolent diners had been local residents, and the movie’s main characters (Fonda, Nicholson, and Hopper) later spoke of the frighteningly real hatred that they felt from those diners. I recognized my neighbors in those extras, and came to envision myself as living in a hell populated by redneck demons. 

Still, I did my best so Peggy wouldn’t have to leave her home. I got a pilot’s license so I could have ready access to other places, but the only plane I could afford was old and slow. I vainly looked for friends in the ads’ section of the Mother Earth News and other alternative magazines. Peggy and I traveled for two months a year, but the day always came when we had to turn the truck in the direction of Mississippi. I joined the Mississippi ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and the Mississippi Native Plant Society in the hope of finding people with whom I had common interests, but only one friendship came out of either group and he left the state as an escaped felon (my friends were usually as lost as myself). I took up canoeing, but even as I tried to lose myself in the beauty of Southern streams, I was haunted by the theme from Easy Rider:

“The river flows, flows to the sea.
Where ever that river goes that’s where I want to be.
Flow river flow, let your waters wash down.
Take me from this road to some other town.”  

To be continued...

My Lurid Past and Other Sordid Tales

Had I not been a bearded atheist, liberal, intellectual, vegetarian, integrationist, environmentalist, pot smoking, Thoreau-reading, lover of freedom, I might not have felt lonely and isolated in rural Mississippi; and had I not felt lonely and isolated, I might have not remained in my seat (thirty feet from where a black man was lynched when I was six) when the district attorney told the grand jurors to stand for prayer; and had I not remained in my seat, I most certainly wouldn’t have been struck on the head by another juror who said through clinched teeth, “Get out of that seat!” But because I was these things, and because I was struck on the head, and because I had grown-up witnessing the bloody price that nonconformists pay for being true to their values in the most ignorant, religious, oppressive, impoverished, freedom-hating, and violence-embracing, state in the Union; I decided that I had rather die than spend the rest of my life surrounded by drawling bigots who took pride in the fact that generations of their families had used violence to force conformity to their asinine deity, their fascist politics, and their Bible-based xenophobia. 

To understand the lowlife mentality of Mississippi and other Deep South states, envision Donald Trump with a Southern accent, the tragedy being that the region hasn’t only failed to join the civilized world during my 35-year absence, it has continued to go downhill in every area but black/white relations (my home town can truthfully claim that it hasn’t lynched a single black man since 1955, when it murdered Lamar Smith for attempting to turn in voter registration cards for his frightened neighbors).

So it was that I built a fantasy around how loved and supported I would feel if only Peggy and I lived in a commune. Though she wasn’t exactly gung ho about the prospect, she was at least open to the possibility, so I proposed that we pack-up and go searching for nirvana. She said that, no, I should be the one to go searching, and she should be the one to visit such places as I liked. So it was that I spent much of 1984, 1985, and part of ‘86 visiting communes, many of them with no thought of living there, but simply because I found them interesting. For example, it was curiosity that inspired my visit to a Hare Krishna dairy farm in south Mississippi and to that religion’s US headquarters near Moundsville, West Virginia. Likewise, it was curiosity that led me to visit a Sufi commune in eastern New York State, and the world’s last active Shaker commune at Sabbath Day Lake, Maine. Then there was Missouri’s hippie-run East Wind Community, with its sixty to eighty residents. (I approved of the group’s communal outhouses, but didn’t fully grasp the etiquette of the situation, so when a woman plopped down beside me while I was laughing at the funny pages, I was mystified by her chilly response to Blondie, Snuffy Smith and Beetle Bailey.)

The smallest commune I visited was in a two-story house owned by a Denver couple who confessed that they were having trouble finding people who were willing to live under their autocratic rule. The largest was guru Stephen Gaskin’s 1,400 member commune The Farm with its nationally known midwifery program presided over by his wife, Ina May Gaskin (who wrote prolifically on the subject). Gaskin’s leadership was sufficiently mellow that I might have considered living there had it not been for the commune’s squalor, and the fact that none of the men cut their hair or shaved their beards. Although they insisted that the practice was voluntary, the fact that every last one of the hundreds of men adhered to it screamed groupthink (Groupthink occurs when the desire for group cohesiveness leads members to uncritically agree to what they think everyone else wants.)

I was very much bothered by the totalitarian regime of another guru, Marc Tizer (aka Yousamien, aka Yo), who ran a commune in Boulder, Colorado. I don’t remember the commune’s name—or even if it had a name—but it is now called the Divine Madness Running Club. Yo gave his followers individualized commands about what to eat, how much to sleep, what sports to engage in, who to live with, and so forth. The names of new sex partners were drawn weekly (the purpose of the weekly change was to discourage “unhealthy attachments,” and in Yo’s view, all attachments were unhealthy). Although Yo claimed to have secret and surefire means to prevent pregnancy, he still ordered abortions.

The commune had fifty to one hundred followers who lived in private residences that were scattered throughout Boulder. I stayed in two of these residences—one of which was occupied by 6-8 women and the other by 6-8 men—and found the people intelligent, educated, personable, physically attractive, and welcoming of questions. When—in one-to-one conversations—I told my new friends that I was opposed to gurus, the gist of their response was, I wouldn’t lie to you. Yo will tell you every thought you ever had. Yo will tell you more about yourself than even you know, and you will recognize that he is right. So it was that I quickly agreed to meet Yo, although I just as quickly backed-out upon being told that “the privilege” would cost me $1,200—satisfaction not guaranteed.

My final tally of communes was: two in Mississippi, two in Tennessee, one in Missouri, one in Texas, one in New Mexico, two in Colorado, one in Virginia, one in West Virginia, one in New Hampshire, one in Maine, two in New York, and one in Oregon. If I didn’t like a place, I left after a day or two, but if I really liked it, I might stay for a week or more. No one ever asked for money to cover the cost of my visit, and it never occurred to me to offer it. Peggy flew to communes in Denver, Richmond, and New York City. She preferred the one in Richmond, but it’s eight members had been working night-and-day for over a year to care for a terminally ill member (whom no one liked and who had been planning to leave when he became ill), and its residents warned us that the commune was unlikely to survive his death.

I liked Richmond fine, but I loved the Foundation for Feedback Learning—now called Ganas— on upper Staten Island in New York City. It’s 35 residents (the number has since doubled) were divided into an inner and an outer circle with membership in the former requiring a lifelong commitment. FFL owned two stores, three or four large houses, and accepted research and teaching contracts related to “feedback learning.” Many members were from Spain, and people candidly admitted that they had only married so they—or someone else in the group—could get a Green Card. The closer I got to the group’s inner circle, the more I was bothered by the fact that their lack of honesty and integrity in dealing with the outside world contradicted their insistence upon honesty and integrity within the group itself. Even so, I found so much to love that I asked Peggy to fly up, which she did, although—for the following reasons—things didn’t go well:

(1) She had been ill, and was still so unwell that she seemed fragile. (2) She had no interest in spending hours a day sitting around the group’s large table baring her soul and listening to others bare theirs, often taking and giving severe criticism in the process. (3) The neighborhood was so bad that she couldn’t take her daily walks without being sexually harassed. (4) When members of the inner circle asked what her interests were and she said gemstones (she had seriously considered a career in gemology), they dismissed her as frivolous. (5) She was disgusted by the number of women I had been having sex with on my travels (we had an open marriage), and the commune contained three women who had a sexual interest in me. (6) Our promised “private quarters” were roomy for the city, but were still smaller than the smallest place we ever lived.

The commune was clearly not a good fit for Peggy, but because the inner circle wanted me, they proposed to her that we move there for a trial period of a year. Before coming to NY, Peggy had applied to the Traveling Nurse Corps, and they called her in NY to offer a four-month stint in Fresno, California. So it was that we moved to Fresno with the thought that we would use our time there to decide about NY.

We liked Fresno—until the daytime highs hit 115—and found it easy to make friends. During one of our calls to Mildred—the leader of the New York commune’s inner circle—we were told that our living expenses (which I would pay in work credits at a communal business, and Peggy would pay in money by working at a nearby hospital) would cost hundreds more than we had been told. When we asked why, Mildred said without even a hint of embarrassment that she had so wanted me to live there that she had lied. We concluded from this that we could never take the group’s word about anything, and we gave up all thought of moving to NY. Unfortunately, this meant that after two years of searching for a place to live, we still had no idea where we would end up. I suggested that, if nothing else turned-up, we could move to Fresno, but when Peggy refused to “trade one oven for another,” I became deeply depressed. To be continued…


References

Mississippi’s Hare Krishna dairy farm: https://newtalavana.org/

West Virginia’s Hare Krishna headquarters: https://www.newvrindaban.com/

New York’s Sufi commune: https://www.theabode.org/

Maine’s Shakers: https://www.maineshakers.com/

Missouri’s East Wind commune: https://www.eastwindblog.co/

Gaskin’s Tennessee commune: https://thefarmcommunity.com/

Ina May Gaskin’s books: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ina+may+gaskin&ref=nb_sb_noss_1 

Groupthink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

Yousamien’s Colorado commune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Madness_Running_Club

New York’s Foundation for Feedback Learning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganas

Visits to Hospital

 

Sacred Heart Medical Center

What I’m about to share represents my memories and beliefs. Peggy’s memories and beliefs might differ.

Two weeks ago to the hour, I was at Eugene’s Sacred Heart Medical Center where a pretty Hong Kong surgeon was blowing me up with carbon dioxide, driving rods into my abdomen, and using a robot to repair three hernias.

Today, I drove Peggy to Sacred Heart for an endoscopy and colonoscopy. Two hours were allotted for the procedure, so I knew that if the phone rang in less than two hours, the news would be bad. I spent those hours strolling about the hospital’s 181-acre grounds and reflecting upon the long history that Peggy and I have had in—and around—hospitals. For her, this meant a 25-year career as a BSRN (a registered nurse with a four year degree). For me it meant working as a respiratory therapy technician, a phlebotomist, an ambulance driver, and a funeral director.

Peggy’s career took her to Mississippi, California, Minnesota, and Oregon, but she mostly worked here in Eugene at Sacred Heart Medical Center where the hospital’s greed, dishonesty, hypocrisy, and callousness, caused it to be deemed Sacred Dollar, and resulted in Peggy becoming so anguished, outraged, and disillusioned that she retired early. Today, my feelings toward Sacred Heart led me to mouth the word bullshit every time I came across a wall-size rendering of the hospital’s mission statement: “We carry on the healing mission of Jesus Christ by promoting personal and community health, relieving pain and suffering, and treating each person in a loving and caring way.”

Despite its Catholic ownership, I doubt that there’s a higher percentage of Catholic employees at SHMC than in the local population (the habit-clad nuns left before Peggy’s arrival in ’86). The most common modern reminder of SHMC’s ownership is a bronze cross in every room (Peggy caught a man energetically ripping one from his wife’s wall), and there used to be a large outdoor statue of the Virgin Mary—from which the mother of one of Peggy’s L&D patients hung herself—but I couldn’t find it today.

During our fifty-years together, Peggy has twice been hospitalized overnight, and I was in four times—for food poisoning, a knee replacement, and two shoulder surgeries. Prior to marriage, I was hospitalized three times. Is seven a lot? Perhaps, but with rising costs, laparoscopic advancements, and the growing threat of untreatable infections, people used to be hospitalized far more often. For example, in the old days, triple hernia repair would have necessitated cutting the patient open, so no one would be sent home the same day. This represents a change for the better, at least for those who have help at home. Without Peggy, I don’t know how I could manage right now. I take immense comfort in knowing that, no matter what is going on in her life or mine, we will be there if the other needs us. 

During our long marriage, I’ve gone from believing that sex was the primary expression of emotional intimacy to realizing that a great many things outrank sex. For instance, adding someone’s name to your savings account; helping him or her bathe after surgery; holding hands while browsing old photos; sharing the anniversary of that first sacred night as “husband and wife”* ; or, if it should come to that, wiping a butt that you once considered too angelic to need wiping.

Peggy often came home from her first hospital job—at the 105-bed King’s Daughters Hospital in rural Mississippi—with funny stories. For instance, one night at KDH, Peggy was working “on second” when the first floor nurse phoned to say that someone had fallen past room 108. Sure enough, Peggy looked out the window of 208 to find her patient lying on the ground. She called for an ambulance—the ambulance shed was just around the corner—and in no time at all, the ambulance came flying. Unfortunately, there was a heavy dew, so when the driver slammed on brakes, the huge vehicle kept right on going, barely missing the patient.

The patient later explained that he had wanted to go home without the usual formality—i.e. paying his bill—so he did what you or I would have done, which was to pack-up his few clothes, urinal, bedpan, and water pitcher. After dropping his suitcase out the window, he mustered-up his optimism and took a flying leap in the direction of a limb on a loblolly pine. To his dismay, three unfortunate events then occurred: (1) the limb broke; (2) he hit the ground; (3) the limb hit him.

On another night at KDH, Peggy was working in the emergency room when an ambulance arrived with two shooting victims. The ER doctor decided to transfer them an hour’s drive north to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, so they were duly loaded—or rather re-loaded—into the ambulance, and Peggy was told to go with them. 

One man was unconscious, and although a bullet in his jaw made it impossible for the other to talk, he proved to be a voluble grunter, fist-shaker, and pantomimer, who was soon able to make Peggy understand that he and the other man had shot one another. She then became inordinately curious as to whether the doctor who had ordered her into the ambulance (where there was no place for her to sit except between the two men) had been privy to this information, but he later proved reticent on the topic.

Why did Peggy never come home with funny stories from SHMC? Maybe the fact that she worked in intensive care—that is until her back gave out from turning unconscious patients—followed by labor and delivery had something to do with it, as did the unhappy work environment, but I’ve also wondered if small town informality might simply be a better vehicle for humor than city impersonality. Another relevant factor might be the grim, merciless, and spontaneity destroying political correctness that characterizes liberal institutions.

I only attended one “celebratory” get-together for the nurses who worked on Peggy’s unit, and although I was well aware of what Peggy told me about her work situation, it was the first time that I got to see for myself how angry and miserable her fellow nurses were. As they wolfed their food, I reflected that I had seen more cheerful people at wakes, and that the absence of liquor appeared to be the only thing between them and a hair-yanking, eye-gouging brawl. 

Despite my contempt for Sacred Heart, I like knowing that the largest medical center between Portland and San Francisco (a distance of 650-miles) is just across town, and that there are thousands of people who have to drive for hours over icy mountain roads (all four grandparents of a newborn baby on Peggy’s unit died when their car slid from such a road) to reach a place that I can get to in fifteen minutes. If the surveys are right, SHMC’s patients feel as badly treated as its employees, yet SHMC still offers a variety of medical specialties, diagnostic tools, and advanced treatments, and the older I get, the more such things matter. Besides, the day might come when the Dollar trades its corporate indifference for a commitment to treat its patients and staff in a “...loving and caring way.” 

 

* Or, in the U.S. anyway, “wife and wife” or “husband and husband,” at least until the Trumpian Supreme Court again allows conservative religious values to dominate marriage.

The Thinking Behind White Southern Racism during the Civil Rights Movement and Even Today

Mississippi Deputy and Sheriff Being Indicted for Murdering Civil Rights Workers

During my Mississippi childhood and adolescence, the following justifications for segregation were expressed by teachers, preachers, at social gatherings, and in newspaper editorials. The state’s most influential newspaperman was Jimmy Ward, whose segregationist column “Covering the Crossroads with Jimmy Ward” appeared daily on the front page of Mississippi’s two largest newspapers—the Clarion Ledger and the Jackson Daily News. Although I mostly avoid use quotation marks in the following arguments, I reproduce them as I heard them, and I heard them a lot.

(1) If God had wanted the races to mix, He would not have separated them geographically. To support integration is to oppose God.

 (2) Race mixing leads to the sin of interracial marriage, and interracial marriage leads to mongrel children.

(3) Black people are the children of Ham, and Ham’s father, Noah, cursed Ham’s descendants with eternal servitude after Ham displayed Noah’s nakedness when Noah was passed-out drunk. (Genesis 9: 20-27).

(4) The inferiority of the colored race is beyond question.

(5) Black people are subhuman, and therefore lack the legal rights of white people. (I bought a deceased black preacher’s library, and found in it a racist work entitled The Negro: a Beast or in the Image of God?)

(6) Before outside agitators stirred them up, Southern Negroes were happy with their lives. 

(7) Those who support integration are knowingly or unknowingly acting at the behest of Soviet Communism, the goal of which is to destroy America.

(8) There are few black people in the North, and those few have been forced into ghettos. Northern whites are hypocrites who don’t understand black people or the necessity of Southern race relations.

(9) Negroes have the mentality of children, and must be kept under control for the good of themselves and others.

(10) America has fallen so deeply into sin that God would abandon our nation entirely if not for Southern piety and patriotism.

(11) To submit to integration would be to betray God, our ancestors, and the 258,000 Southerners who died in the Civil War.

 

Why did the South cling to such baseless arguments?

(a) They were all that most Southerners had ever known, and few people even thought to question them. Others were afraid to do so because it could be a life-wrecking experience.

(b) Friends, family, neighbors, and authority figures were all adamantly opposed to integration.

(c) Seemingly overnight, the white South went from being largely ignored in popular culture to being viciously criticized in political speeches, Northern newspapers, Northern news magazines, and the enormously popular Life Magazine. Its religion, values, and speech, were mocked, belittled, and condemned, by the rest of the nation and even the world. Incest jokes abounded. White Southerners were presented as ignorant buffoons, psychopathic rednecks, and toothless hillbillies. The white South felt besieged, and most people responded by clinging ever more tenaciously to traditional beliefs and values.

Northern companies canceled plans for Southern factories, and this caused the already impoverished region to sink even deeper. Thousands of Southerners canceled their subscriptions to Life. Klan membership increased, and there was talk of a second Civil War. Frequent church burnings, the assassination of Medgar Evers—the state’s NAACP director—and the brutal murders of Freedom Riders Micky Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were looked upon by many with approval.

(d) White Southerners who supported integration were seen as traitors to God and to their own people, and were therefore hated above all other integrationists. Their children were harassed at school, and they themselves were subject to job loss, hate mail, vandalism, social ostracism, physical assault, loss of friendship, credit cancellation, having their pets poisoned, obscene and threatening phone calls, bullets through their windows, cross burnings in their yards (I personally witnessed this). The well-liked and influential couple in Hodding Carter’s So the Hefners Left McComb (McComb is twenty miles from where I lived) were parents to that year’s Miss Mississippi when their harassment started, but they still fled the South in fear for their lives.

(e) I will end this segment with some personal examples of Southern white anger. Klan literature was sometimes deposited in my family’s driveway. One night while driving home, I came upon a cross burning in a neighbor’s yard—no one was in sight.

School was in progress when John Kennedy was killed, and most students cheered. When one girl (whose parents favored integration) asked to be excused on the day of his funeral, her request was denied, and when she stayed home anyway, she was given failing grades in every class. I remained publicly silent about his death, although I wrote a note of sympathy to Jacqueline Kennedy.

Martin Luther King, Jr, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated after school hours, but I was attending play practice at a Methodist college when King died. As most of my fellow students cheered, I reflected upon how odd it was for those who were preparing for the ministry and the mission fields to celebrate a man’s murder.

My high school’s Spanish teacher took her class to Monterey, Mexico, each year. In 1966, an English class from Monterey visited my school. As they got off the bus, many students cursed them, flipped them the bird, called them niggers (because of their dark skin), and demanded that they get back on the bus and go home. The Mexicans clearly didn’t anticipate such behavior, and their ignorance of what some of the words meant surely left them even more confused.

Also in ’66, four black students (three girls and a boy) integrated my high school. To my knowledge, none were assaulted, although they were treated with unremitting contempt. Again, I remained silent. I suspect that a great many white students were like I in that they either secretly favored integration or were secretly appalled by what they witnessed.
 

When a rumor circulated that black people might visit our church en masse, my father was asked to stand at the door with several other men to keep them out. He said to the men who asked him: “This is God’s house, and if God doesn’t want them here, then let God keep them out.” 

My father treated black people with respect, but my mother treated them coldly and with condescension. One day, she chastened me for addressing a black lady as “Ma’am,” and she repeatedly warned me to avoid getting near black people lest “their germs” land on me. The commonly held belief that black people were “unclean” hearkened back the ancient Jews’ attitude toward gentiles. 

******

Thankfully, my father didn’t cancel his subscription to Life Magazine, and I well remember the 1967 issue that contained the photo at the top of this post. That photo did more than words to impress upon the rest of the nation the fact that, a hundred years after the Civil War, Southern whites still regarded the very lives of black people as disposable. Now, the white South is once again using racism as the basis for discriminatory laws.

Because moral advancement in the South is invariably contingent upon outside force, the advancement is lost when the force is withdrawn. So it is that when a conservative Supreme Court overturned the Voting Rights Act in 2013, white governors and legislators went back to denying the vote to black people. How can it do such a thing? In numerous ways. For example, Texas now requires that heavily populated black precincts have the same number of voting machines as sparsely populated white precincts. Meanwhile, over in Georgia, black voters aren’t only being made to stand in line for six hours (there being many more white precincts, white voters tend to be spared this indignity), anyone who offers them food or water is subject to a year in jail. 

So it is that Red State officials who are charge of insuring election fairness first determine when, where, and how, black people—and other Democrats—vote, and then they do their utmost to make voting so odious that voters stop trying. In rare cases where this tactic fails, they look for an excuse, however lame, to declare votes invalid. Now that Trump has packed the Supreme Court with minority-hating religious conservatives, appeals to that court for fairness are doomed (according to the conservative justices, the federal government simply has no business telling states how to run their elections).

In 1861, the South’s insistence that it be allowed to enslave black people resulted a war that cost 620,000 lives, a war from which the  South learned nothing except that it had to be sneaky in describing its abuse of black people (instead of calling them slaves, it referred to them as convict laborers or as people who were working off their just debts. Even today, the state of Mississippi (along with other Southern states) is such a moral and economic morass that many of its citizens would starve without federal assistance (Mississippi opposes federal aid simply because it can’t bear the thought of putting food on the tables of black people). By all measures of health, happiness, and prosperity, the states of the Deep South are in constant competition for last place in everything that is good and first place in everything that is bad. Despite this, Mississippi—the most religious state in the Union—regards itself as so beloved by God that the existence of the entire nation rests upon its singular status in divine eyes. As the Bible says, the ways of God are but foolishness in the eyes of men.